Cranes have grace and strength—when threatened, they will break your arm with their stabbing bill. But other things also drew me to these birds. They are, as the late Peter Matthiessen, the great American naturalist, put it, an indicator for a vanishing wilderness. The crane family, the Gruidae, occur on every continent but South America. Of fifteen species worldwide, eleven are threatened by human persecution: poisoning, trapping, hunting, and, above all, the destruction of wild habitats, the freshwater wetlands in which they breed and hunt for frogs, voles, dragonflies, and plant roots. Cranes are cosmopolitan in diet, and in range. They migrate great distances, and you can usually hear their clarion before you see them. Cranes, said Aldo Leopold, the grandfather of wildlife conservation, are “the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.”
In Asia, cranes are bound deep into the cultures of the lands through which they pass. I have been to one patch of swampland and neighboring grain fields in Hokkaido, in northern Japan, where a small population of Japanese, or red-crowned, cranes, the second rarest of all the species, resides all year round. The women of the Ainu, Hokkaido’s indigenes, used to perform an annual crane dance in emulation of the birds’ spectacular displays of courtship. In South Korea, in the courtyard of the Tongdosa temple, a crane dance has been performed since the seventh century. In China, the birds are held in special affection for their fidelity (they form lifelong pair bonds), and for the auspiciousness they bring. In the Forbidden City in Beijing, a huge bronze statue of a crane guards the entrance to the Qianqinggong, the Temple of Heavenly Purity, where the emperor once held council. Other temple statues in China and Vietnam show cranes balancing atop the auspicious tortoise, which is like getting a double dollop of good luck.
When I was in Ulan Bator, I went to see an ornithologist, now gray, Natsagdorjin Tseveenmyadag. I found him in the Mongolian Institute of Zoology, a handsome Russian-era mansion in the classical idiom that struggled to keep up appearances. Gaping holes in the plaster exposed the shoddy brickwork. Inside, the floorboards groaned at every step. In his office Dr. Tseveenmyadag stood beaming, surrounded by stuffed birds. Tseveenmyadag knew more about cranes than anyone in Asia. Soon after Communism collapsed, he took Peter Matthiessen to Dauria in search of cranes. Matthiessen later wrote a notable account of his travels with cranes, in his book Birds of Heaven.
When he was younger, Tseveenmyadag spent seven straight years out in the field, studying Dauria’s wild cranes. “They’re such huge birds,” he said. “I figured, if I have to study one family, they shouldn’t be too hard to identify.” He told me about the changes in Dauria since his trip with Matthiessen a decade ago. Then, everywhere they went, they found crane species they simply had not expected, especially the Siberian crane—“very, very rare.” But a decade ago rain had been much, much more abundant, and with swollen rivers and brimming lagoons, many more birds moved along the flyway. In recent years, herders have complained of drought. Shortly before seeing Tseveenmyadag, I had telephoned the director of the Daursky Nature Reserve just over on the Russian side of the border. Among birders, it is famous for the Torey Lakes, a fabled spot for wading birds, wildfowl, and cranes. Visitors need a special permit from the Russian Border Guards. “Don’t bother coming,” the director said brusquely. “The lakes have vanished. The birds, too.”
“Still, in some places”—on the aeronautical map I laid out on his desk, Tseveenmyadag pointed to swirls of the Onon and Kherlen rivers—“in some places, we’re getting more cranes.”
• • •
We camped for the first night on the Onon’s right bank, just above where the river began to glide in voluptuous oxbows. The sun had nearly sunk upstream, the high ridge on the river’s far side picked out by the last rays falling on boulders of molten granite. The river was already dark when the trumpeting started, far away at first but growing powerful until it filled the valley and drew echoes from the bare hills around us: a woody, deep-fluted trill, low and clear. Wild cranes. The trumpeting rose and then ceased, leaving only its reverberation. The birds had spent the day feeding on communal grounds—wheat and barley fields where whole mixed flocks of crane species gathered strength for the autumn migration—before returning to this place. It must have been their nesting ground all summer. But very soon—tomorrow, next week—they would leave this spot and start out on their great autumn journey.
When I woke, the inky sky and river were lightening. A mist snaked down the river and spilled over the banks. It seeped into the water meadow behind us, lapping at the foot of a hill whose skyline, notched like filed teeth, stood out clear. Somewhere between the hill and our spot were the cranes.
The Onon was here already wide and strong, perhaps five stones’ throw across. And it was coming alive. An orange glow picked out first the autumn willows and serviceberry bushes. A peregrine, white and black from this distance, a hunter of ducks, bent its wings and scythed low over the waters, rising to settle on a bough over the river. Two geese wheeled over the river and, out of sight beyond the oxbow, shrieked a final despair before the splash of their landing. I slithered down the bank and eased into the cool river, fumbling across stones slimy with fine weed. Swimming now, it took strong strokes to keep station on the riverine conveyor. In the Onon’s fishy world, predators keep at this for hours. I could hold it for only minutes before weakening, and then surrendering. Now on my back, the current snatched me and carried me fast downstream.
And now I heard a new sound: the stomping of boots, then silence, then the screech of line stripped off a fishing reel; a pause, a soft plop. I crept out of the water and along the high bank toward the sound. There in the mist beneath me was a man in riding boots and leather cap. He hauled a huge lure rippling across the still face of the river, an imitation of a swimming vole. Farther out, a silver spray of small fish leaped from the water as one, taking flight from a monster moving beneath them. Taimen were what the man was after.
Compared with the higher reaches, the river was changing bit by bit. Though still wild, it was growing more involved with our own kind. In the meadow behind lay a horse-drawn hay rake from another century, its high iron wheels and curved tines red with rust. A pitchfork was stuck upright in a rick. Buryats. Some must be camped nearby to gather end-of-summer hay. The fisherman was presumably one of them.
I now moved carefully toward the hills set back from the river, skirting the sedge meadows that flanked the river. Somewhere among the meadows were the cranes that landed last night. They found me first, for when I spotted them they were edging deeper into the reedbeds. I stopped, kept low, and trained my glasses on the birds, perhaps three hundred yards away: parents and their single young. The offspring had muddy plumage. But the adults, with a brilliant red patch on each cheek, had white throats and a white streak running all the way down the backs of their necks—white-naped cranes. For the rest, the birds were gray: not the slate gray described in my field guide, but a shimmering, nacreous luster.
I squatted and watched them between the reeds. It was an age before the birds resumed feeding, rooting about for insects, frogs, corms; but they never entirely let go their wariness, and they knew well that I was there. I was sore on my haunches, as the sun climbed and the day warmed fast. Without warning, the three birds leaped into the air. They climbed, circling in great slow long flaps with their long necks outstretched, and once they had height they flew, still trumpeting, straight over the toothed ridge into the southeast.
• • •
Back by the Onon, we broke camp, in order to push deeper into Dauria in search of its story. It is not only the wildlife that suffers from borders and the policies pursued near them. This rolling, empty land is far, far from centers of political power or human population. Yet time and again over the centuries, powerful forces have broken over Dauria, sweeping before them the peoples who lived there. In the Mongolian part of Dauria, it is the Buryats who today form the greater part of a sparse population. Their chief center is the large village o
f Dadal, one of several places that stake a claim to being the birthplace of Genghis Khan. The Buryats are different from the great majority of Mongolians, who call themselves the Khalkha people. I wanted to find out how and why. The nearby presence of Russia turned out to be part of the answer.
From our camp by the river, we kept to the Onon valley, driving through meadowland and scattered pines to Dadal. Dadal was the administrative center of the local soum, something akin to a county seat. The village was striking for being a neat collection of log cabins and healthy paddocks bounded by split-post fences. This level of Swiss tidiness and domesticity was unfamiliar in other parts of Mongolia, whose county centers sport a wild, unkempt air.
They are, nevertheless, a Mongol people, but their traditional homeland is farther north, in Russia. Numbers of Buryats came down to this quiet, northeastern part of Mongolia in the early twentieth century, in the hope of finding sanctuary as Russian revolution and then civil war raged around them. But in Mongolia most Buryats found no peace. The Khalkha Mongols resented the Buryats’ relatively higher level of education. And then, when the political climate hardened under Communist rule, they found the Buryats, as outsiders, a suspect group. The Khalkha and their Russian advisers deemed the Buryats, a border people dwelling on the fringe of things, to be susceptible to recruitment as spies by the Japanese imperial forces then beginning to press west from Manchuria. Whether there was any truth to the suspicion scarcely seemed to matter. Buryats were swept up in the great purges of 1937–38, carried out by Mongolia’s own Stalin, the dictator Khorloogiin Choibalsan; like his patron, he was ever on the hunt for enemies of the people. When we bounced into Dadal, there in the compound of a small log temple, at the foot of whitewashed stupas, a rotund monk was leading prayers for the remembrance of Stalin’s victims. A line of ancient, sun-leathered, bowlegged villagers sat on a long bench in their finest satin dels and sashes, and high, embroidered boots. They held in their laps bowls of blueberries as offerings. They were Stalin’s orphans, last witnesses to monstrous crimes.
At this memorial ceremony, a tiny spot in a vast country, unexpectedly I found an old friend, dressed in his best del. Gankhuyag or “Ganaa,” in his forties, had irrepressible energies, and he was never without a scheme. When I first met him, on the eastern steppe, he had wild and ambitious plans to revitalize nomadic pastoralism for the twenty-first century. On that occasion, he was on his way to Ulan Bator to make the case for sweeping administrative changes. Under socialism, the population had been organized into three hundred soum centers, administrative county units that in reality were little more than a few wooden huts and a shoddy concrete building housing the Communist Party. The center handed out grain, ran a school, and dispensed medicine. Herders tended to drift toward each newly created soum center, leading to overgrazing of the pastures, a predicament magnified many times over around the capital, Ulan Bator, itself.
Ganaa’s solution harked back to the age of Genghis Khan: he wanted to abolish the central planners’ soum and re-create the hushuu, the banners of old, each represented by a white yak’s tail, under which all the Mongol people were once grouped. There were eight white banners, and a black one for Genghis Khan himself. When Ganaa explained his ideas, they sounded not sentimental at all. There would, he said, be fewer but bigger herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats. They would shift constantly among the remoter pastures, herded by Mongolians of the toughest spirit. The animals would be fatter, and the rest of the country’s grasslands, because less frequently grazed, would be healthier. But in Ulan Bator, the politicians, distracted by the spoils from a mining boom, failed to see what was in it for them.
Now we picnicked in a meadow, by a bright, clear stream on which plump trout sucked greedily at errant grasshoppers. Ganaa told me about his latest, more local, venture. It was to get Dadal’s kids to be more caring of the great river that flowed among them. A particular problem was that country Mongolians, who had evinced not the slightest interest in river life until now—fish being wholly absent from the Mongolian diet—acquired a taste for fishing from the rising numbers of sportfishermen from the capital and abroad turning up on the Onon’s banks. With alarming gusto, locals were hoicking huge taimen out of the river. Taimen take years to grow to their impressive breeding size. It does not take much to fish these monsters out and so jeopardize the whole population. Ganaa was trying to convert everyone to the religion of catch-and-release, hoping that local opinion rather than fish wardens, for whom there was no money anyway, would shame the taimen killers into giving up.
The picnic over, we dropped Ganaa back in the village and bumped toward the Daurian borderlands. We pulled out of the valley onto a high, undulating, almost trackless steppe of long prairie grass. Two hours later, Ganaa’s image reappeared like some mirage, this time on a billboard in the middle of an empty steppe. The billboard showed him returning a taimen to the Onon’s waters and urging passersby to love their rivers. It was, apart from in the capital, the only time in Mongolia that I had seen a billboard, and the effect was surreal.
The jeep relished this smooth open country, and Gala broke out the Mongolian songs—half of the national repertory is about horses, the other half about mothers. The sky expanded in scale with the prairie. Soon, we were in the middle of growing knots of the lithe Mongolian gazelle, two or three dozen at a time. The lowering sun caught a pinkish tone in their buff flanks, and when they took off with their pronking gait, they showed a heart-shaped patch on their rumps—“Catch us if you can!”
We camped as the sun came down near the edge of a prairie lagoon. Birds were moving querulously across the water: bar-headed geese, swan geese, rafts of ducks squabbling before settling in for the night on the bosom of the lake. The next morning, the lake and shoreside were astir. Mongolian larks swarmed for insects over the grasses; marsh harriers hunted low over the reedbeds; godwits moved along the shore; and the bar-headed geese took off in honking squadrons. And then, over the hill above the lagoon, a faint trumpeting, growing closer. First a handful of cranes came over the skyline, then dozens and within minutes hundreds of birds, long necks extended, throwing a revolving, speckled shade as they wheeled in a loud chorus above the slope. One by one, they began to settle in the tallgrass. Soon, only the occasional snorting trill broke the silence.
These birds were mostly demoiselle cranes, Anthropoides virgo, the smallest of the cranes, and the commonest in these parts. They are also perhaps the most graceful: gray and black, with a white tuft behind their head, they walk with a Parisian bustle of dark tail feathers behind them. The cranes here had gathered in a group big enough—I counted three hundred—to begin the migration. Any day now, a final clatter, and the birds would be gone. Demoiselle cranes undertake among the most grueling migrations of any species. They fly high—at more than twenty thousand feet—over the Himalayas and then glide into India. They arrive exhausted, and vulnerable to birds of prey. They overwinter and regather strength in the Khichan marshes of Rajasthan and the seasonal wetlands at Kutch in Gujarat. In the languages of North India and Pakistan, the crane is called a koonj, and that is what slender girls of great beauty are called, too. In the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana, a verse records the poet’s anger when he sees a hunter kill the male of a pair of demoiselle cranes while they make love. The female circles in despair above, and the author, Valmiki, curses the hunter. All literature up to this poem was, Hindus say, divinely revealed. And so it means that the first poem composed by man, a poem shot through with beauty and sadness and anger, has as its subject a crane.
Beside our lake, a herder rode over to our camp, dismounted, and sat on the grass cross-legged as his horse hung its head over his shoulder. Batsuren’s face was chestnut brown and wrinkled. As was often the way, he knew Gala, and Tseveenmyadag, the crane specialist. In fact, Batsuren was one of a number of herders whom Tseveenmyadag had asked to take part in counting crane species. Near the rivers, he said, crane numbers were rising. He had helped tag b
irds, the same birds coming back to exactly the same place.
“And round here”—Batsuren gave a loose wave of the hand—“they are staying closer to herders. Where there are people, there are cranes. It’s the wolves they’re afraid of. We won’t touch a crane: it’s bad luck to kill one. Kill a crane, and the birds will come back and break your stirrup.”
More recently, cranes have come to symbolize something else: international harmony among previously fractious neighbors. For much of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, China and Russia scarcely talked to each other. Mongolia, then an unwilling vassal of the Soviet Union, also felt a chill in its relations with China. It was, at its height, a cold war among the three countries, and borders froze. It was scientists who initiated the thaw. When it came to cranes, scientists from three mutually suspicious countries found that they could work together. Since the six crane species nesting in Dauria, or refueling there during their long migrations, were no respecters of borders, the ornithologists who cared about them could not afford to be either. Among themselves, in the 1970s they began making discreet contact, exchanging information about cranes on their respective patches. Then they held symposia. They began visiting one another’s crane reserves. Then—why not?—they proposed tying these reserves into an official, transborder conservation zone. That way, the countries might deal collectively with the threats to these astonishing birds. It was not just a matter of hunting and poisoning in lawless Russia. In China, rapid economic development, even in this remote corner, was drawing off water. Farmers, too, were eager to drain what to them were worthless wetlands that could be transformed into grain fields. Scientists broke the ice among the three prickly countries, and then cross-border exchanges developed their own momentum. And all because of the cranes.
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